A Welsh Love Affair
It was 1998 in Newtown, Wales (that's Drenwyd, Cymru for the cultural purists) that I was finally to meet the man I had been corresponding with by mail since we were both fourteen. I had first received my penfriend’s name and address from the Australia Post pavillion at World Expo '88 in Brisbane. Little did Tim and I know then how close we would become as the result of a random pairing foisted on us by Australia's postal service.
Tim and his son on one of Wales' ubiquitous hills. This one overlooks Newtown.
Tim was 24 years old by the time we met - tall and slim, with long hair and a vaguely regal profile, given his rather long face and a nose to match. He was also the unemployed, single father of an extremely determined three-year-old boy. Nothing in my penfriend’s experience had left him likely to live contentedly in the rural heart of Wales. He had been through too many dead-end, small-town jobs. Too many family court hearings. Too many tightly rolled spliffs smoked in cold, cheaply furnished housing commission loungerooms. By the time I met him in the flesh, Tim was comepletely immune to the ancient, rugged beauty which had effectively penned him in his entire life. But me? I was absolutely captivated, in only the best sense.
It is easy to believe that in Newtown - an ironically named place where the weekly traders’ fair has staunchly been held every Tuesday since 1279 - nothing ever changes. Deposited at the bottom of a valley in true Welsh style, Newtown is split unevenly in two by the lively but frigid Severn river. In winter, the swans have the Severn all to themsleves. The icy, rushing water, punctuated by smooth stones and waving reeds, is spanned within the town limits by four bridges. The locals, cold and oblivious to the romantic potential of a river in winter, cross hurriedly at a safe distance above.
The town itself is a small maze of narrow streets where weathered old men in tweed go about their business alongside brassy young women in high-heels pushing strollers. All this is overseen on each side by outrageously steep, green hills. Luckily, the sharp inclines don’t seem to bother the sheep. Better yet, the farmers are actually rumoured by some town’s folk to have evolved one leg longer than the other, as a Darwinian solution to generations worth of traversing slopes.
Being an Antipodean descendent of Welsh grandparents, I marvelled as turns of phrase that I hadn’t heard since my grandmother’s death came back to life all around me. But nothing enthralled me more than the silent and deserted hilltop ruins of medieval castles. Tim’s father, a skilled stone mason and passionate historian, had been employed for many years (until the heritage fund dried up) to work on excavating around, and restoring, the foundations of local ruins. As a result, Tim had grown up with legendary battle fields and the collapsed fortresses of nobility as his play grounds. And yet, with a howling wind whipping up and over the snow-capped hill on which Castell Dolforwyn had been built more than seven hundred years ago, he could turn his back on the old stones with a shrug. Wales, as he reminded me, had given him nothing.
A minority of Tim’s friends, well versed in the turbulent social history of the Welsh, stick fast to a bitter resentment of the English. They make armchair plots, only half jokingly, to sabotage the supply of water to England from Welsh dams, while on the other side of the border, the English make arrogant jokes about the Welsh language (...“baa-aa”...). Tim was apathetic. I got the impression that he had stopped caring, at about the same time his carpentry apprenticeship had come to nothing and he was forced to take unskilled work at the local tannery - by all accounts an evil-smelling and soul-destroying place, which has, nevertheless, provided employment at one time or another for most of Newtown’s men.
It seems somewhat ironic, or perhaps fitting, that Newtown’s most famous son is the late Robert Owen, a 19th century social reformer and champion of the working classes. In Owen’s time, Newtown had been a thriving centre for the production of flannel.
The local textile industry is long since dead. But the town lives on, bursting at the seams with thoroughly modern young children who fervently believe that their television heroes, the Teletubbies, live in the domed hill to the east of town which is studded with giant (magic!) white windmills. Of course, the textile factories may be gone - replaced over time by the likes of wind farms and tanneries, not to mention primary schools - but the charming old pubs, still the domain of the working classes, remain. The Pheasant, the Elephant and Castle and the Black Boy Inn each provide a day-time refuge for the unemployed and shift workers, too often accompanied by pool-playing children wagging school.
At the end of four impossibly short weeks spent in Newtown, I bundled myself and my bags onto the train headed for London. Sitting back, I gazed out the steam-smeared window. As the train pulled away from the station, the innocuous looking tannery came into view, firmly maintaining its place, under a powder of snow, in the industrial estate on the edge of town. Beyond the town, trees and bushes - winter skeletons - could not prevent me from seeing past them into the lush fields beyond the tracks. Here and there I caught glimpses of the graceful Severn, winding her way towards the English border. Up on the hillsides, patches of thick, sparkling frost precisely filled the areas of ground cast in shadow. Whispy and domesticated strands of smoke rose into the gloom from the chimneys of increasingly remote farm houses. I closed my eyes, lulled by the rhythm and warmth of the train, and prepared to dream of that fierce looking red dragon which seemed, in my mind’s eye, almost ready to spring from its place in the centre of the Welsh flag. To me, magic truly seemed possible in Wales. But then, I don’t live there.
Overlooking the ruins of Dolforwyn castle